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I have seen what I believe is a “farmed raised” atemp of c. formosus at 24$ a pound at wholesale from a local food distributor which my stupid boss accually bought 5#. None of them were over 2 inches long or even 2 inches at the cap, most looked like yellow/orange rabbit poop. Kept saying to myself who would pick this?

$8.99/lb is quite a decent price. A few years ago when chanterelles were still available from Whole Foods here in Center City Phila, they went at at least $20/lb regardless of the quality. I think the greedy bastards discontinued them here because no one bought them. Even then I thought it was a rip off.

I hadn’t thought about them being treated to resist suffocation, but it makes a lot of sense. I saw these same guys in costco in santa cruz yesterday, and while they look worse than the ones in the woods right now, they looked much better than the chanterelles available at, say, whole foods…which are presumably picked in our area…they have traveled far.

They definitely are not C. cibarius. The real cibarius has not been shown to occur in the PNW (although a variety – C. c. var. roseocanus does) and these don’t look like it anyway. The most common of the golden chanterelles in most of the PNW is C. formosus (described from a collection made on Vancouver Island), and the stature and scaly brown caps in these suggest that’s what they are (by the way, C.f. is the state mushroom of Oregon).